Modern electronic appliances and industrial products rely on electronic devices such as standard and custom integrated circuits (ICs). An IC designed and manufactured for specific purposes is called an ASIC. The number of functions, which translates to transistors, included in each of those ICs has been rapidly growing year after year due to advances in semiconductor technology.
Normally the chip design process begins when algorithm designers specify all the functionality that the chip must perform. This is usually done in a language like C or Matlab. A team of chip specialists, tools engineers, verification engineers and firmware engineers then work many man-years to map the algorithm to a hardware chip and associated firmware. The team can use an off-the-shelf processor, which is proven but may have performance limitations because the standard architecture may not fit well with the algorithm.
The alternative is to design a custom architecture and custom hardware to achieve high performance for the desired algorithm. A computer architecture is a detailed specification of the computational, communication, and data storage elements (hardware) of a computer system, how those components interact (machine organization), and how they are controlled (instruction set). A machine's architecture determines which computations can be performed most efficiently, and which forms of data organization and program design will perform optimally.
The custom chip approach is a very expensive process and also fraught with risks from cost-overruns to technical problems. Developing cutting-edge custom IC designs introduces many issues that need to be resolved. Higher processing speeds have introduced conditions into the analog domain that were formerly purely digital in nature, such as multiple clock regions, increasingly complex clock multiplication and synchronization techniques, noise control, and high-speed I/O.
Another effect of increased design complexity is the additional number of production turns that may be needed to achieve a successful design. Yet another issue is the availability of skilled workers. The rapid growth in ASIC circuit design has coincided with a shortage of skilled IC engineers.